This invention relates to the production of artwork.
The explosive growth over the last few decades of the graphics art industry particularly in the field of advertising has been made possible in part by the development of graphic arts materials consisting of sets of indicia such as letters, numbers, symbols and the like which are preformed and selected for use by the graphic artist rather than having to be drawn out each time. The most widespread examples of such products are various diecut vinyl sign lettering materials and dry transfer materials.
When using such materials, the user normally requires to produce a legend on artwork, for example to assemble one or more words to form a headline or slogan, each word being assembled from individual letters. In order to achieve the desired effect, the individual letters must be spaced correctly relative to one another and the whole of the word or slogan or the like must be positioned relative to other components of the artwork. This is sometimes difficult to achieve in practice, since one has to build up the legend letter by letter and one cannot see the whole legend visually until it has been so built up. If positioning in the other artwork e.g. a background photograph or frame also has to be achieved, a highly developed sense of optical balance and positioning is required in the user. This is a skill which is very difficult to acquire and indeed is never acquired adequately even by many professionals.
In order to avoid this difficulty, various techniques have been developed but none is entirely satisfactory. One of the simplest techniques is to form the legend or so-called wordset on a sheet of transparent material such as cellulose acetate. This enables the letters to be positioned relative to one another as desired and if more than one word is formed, enables the words to be mutually relatively positioned appropriately. The transparent sheet can then be overlaid on the background and moved round until the desired position is achieved, whereafter the whole sheet may be adhered to the artwork or attached to a base e.g. by a masking tape hinge. Such a system clearly fails to simulate the desired final artwork very adequately. Using vinyl sign lettering is easier than using dry transfer since the individual letters can be handled without too much difficulty or danger of distortion or breakage. Thus the desired letters may be assembled on a surface, each letter being still attached to its release paper or card backing and the wordset so formed can then be consolidated by applying e.g. masking tape to the individual letters. This enables the word or words to be moved as a whole and, after the backings have been removed from the letters, because of the highly tacky adhesive on them they can be firmly adhered in the desired position on the artwork and will stay there when the masking tape or the like is pulled away. This system requires some skill to work it satisfactorily but its chief defect is that vinyl sign lettering is only available in relatively large letter sizes and a few typeface styles. The flexibility of typeface style and letter size found in dry transfer material is simply not available.